Like-for-like plant controls upgrades:When are they an advantage?Plants weighing a simple version update versus a new system have several factorsto consider.Mark Grant, Ph.D., Business Development Manager for Power, Schneider Electric

District energy plant owners face growing demands to modernize their plant controls and electrical systems. When deciding whether
and how to modernize, owners will usually look at a simple “stay-the-course”
upgrade to the existing system. The other
option is to do a more exhaustive search
of the technology and the benefits that
new solutions can or cannot provide. In
many cases owners can preserve some
of their existing capital base and still
upgrade a portion of the system with new
controls technologies.

While the upfront costs and pains
may be lower with a simple like-for-like
version upgrade, a true next-generation
system can significantly improve the plant
lifecycle cost benefits; and, if applied correctly, the new features will enhance profitability. There is no right or wrong answer
as to which course to take: Each set of
propositions will be unique to the end
user, but the qualitative points to be evaluated are the same. In deciding how to
approach a control system upgrade, plant
owners should consider several key tech-

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nology points and understand the values
these can bring to the plant.

There is a real chance that district
energy systems are not using the newest
controls technologies that would enable
them to provide fuel sources to run the
plants more efficiently, do online troubleshooting while the system is running,
integrate electrical systems out of the
box, use block programming that ensures
consistency over the years, use predictive
maintenance of system components and
take advantage of many more benefits.

When evaluating control systems,
plant owners can find it useful to explore
the advantages of a simple like-for-like
upgrade versus those of a new system
that may have a bit higher upfront cost
but provides long-term benefits.

MANAGING CHANGE

Kurt Lewin, the father of changemanagement, developed a theory called“UnFreeze-Change-Freeze,” which identi-fies the stages of managing change and,more importantly, where and why changewill fail. Change management guru JohnKotter developed an eight-step processthat added a modern context to the the-ory and identified markers that corrobo-rate Lewin’s success factors and failuremechanisms. In particular, four of Kotter’ssteps can be applied to help guide plantowners in their decision-making: · Develop a management vision. With-out a direction it is impossible for man-agers to know whether to keep mod-ernization costs low or to look to thelong term. · Develop a network to share tribalknowledge with the next generationof engineers. Costs are associated withgathering knowledge from senior engi-neers especially if older control sys-tems will just get a facelift. · Manage accountability and milestonesfor the new control system. To maxi-mize the value of the new system, allstakeholders must be accountable tomanage deployment of tangentialmeasurement devices and their associ-ated costs. · Provide tools to quantify the paradigmchange. Plant owners can choose to